In Sam Gadbury’s Robotics Club, students may find the perfect marriage of working in the technical world of computer science with the hands-on experience of building and creating physical projects.
Though what many seek is simply the opportunity to build things.
“For most of the kids who do robotics, that’s what they like,” Gadbury said. “They like to take something and build and design and have a product at the end.”
Currently, Gadbury’s students are working on their largest project yet.
This spring, the students in the Robotics Club at Mercer Island High School will put their skills to task when they participate in the FIRST Robotics competition, a national tournament for aspiring inventors and engineers.
Billed as the “ultimate sport for the mind,” the competition challenges teams of students to build and program industrial-size robots to engage in a difficult field game against other competitors. Students have six weeks to design, build, program and test their robots to meet the season’s engineering challenge.
The club, which is in its third year at the high school, has previously competed in the VEX robotics competition. For that competition, their robots were smaller in size, more akin to a large remote-controlled car. The robot the students are currently building is more like the size of a go-kart.
Club leader Maya Rudd said she started doing robotics last year. She said she’s always liked working on computer science projects, and she enjoys the creative focus that comes with the engineering process. Working with the club, she’s learned a few things regarding leadership skills.
“It helps me with working with a team. I’m one of the leaders, so it’s taught me a lot about delegating jobs to people,” she said.
Evan Ashley, another club leader, is in his first year of robotics, though he has four years of programming experience. He said working in the club has helped him refine his problem-solving skills.
“In setting up the computer for the robot, I had to undergo a lot of problem-solving. We had to figure out how to update the computer, how to get all the software out of the computer, get Java running on the computer, all this complicated stuff,” he said. “There were instructions, but they didn’t define all the problems that we’d end up facing, and I think that in a job environment, it would be very similar where I’d encounter a problem and my boss wouldn’t necessarily know what to do, and I’d have to solve the problem.”
Gadbury said robotics provides his students a different kind of challenge.
“I think it’s definitely a different mental organization. There are a lot of aspects going on at the same time, and a lot of times, the academic side is not really that strong,” he said. “It’s combining the fact that you have to build something that’s pretty precise and you have to take into fact different disciplines, like putting in these computer science disciplines. I have [someone] working on a manipulator right now and you have to know how this works in a virtual world, too. Like inside the computer, how does this work? Because you can’t just give somebody a set of parts and say, ‘Make it work.’ You need to know how it translates back and forth.”
Outside of their regular class time, the club meets three times a week after school. Gadbury said sometimes the students will stick around until 6 or 7 p.m. And while they are largely responsible for their own work, he said the club is always looking for mentors.
“Even if they don’t have engineering industry experience, being process-oriented and knowing how to stay on a schedule and a little bit of aptitude goes a long way for mentors,” Gadbury said. “Really, it’s just being able to work with kids and say, ‘This is your next step, and if I don’t know the answer, I’ve got more tools to find the answer.’”
FIRST Robotics competitions will take place March 3-5 at Auburn Mountainview High School and April 1-3 at Auburn High School.
The Robotics Club is currently looking for sponsorships. For those who’d like to sponsor, contact samuel.gadbury@mercerislandschools.org.
